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The Bayreuth experience

Robin Holloway

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

Robin Holloway visits the town for the first time and sees seven Wagner operas

With Meistersinger the next day I was still unsure. ‘It must be me’, or else ‘It must be an under-projected interpretation’ (the work’s staging was anything but! Katherina Wagner — great-granddaughter — seemed to be vying to produce the grossest, most tendentious spectacle possible, while evincing hapless incapacity with the elementary basics of stagecraft). The soft blending of Act III was heavenly; but the great Chorale towards the start of the closing scene failed to rend the skies. And by the very close, with choir and orchestra going full tilt to less than maximal effect, I was certain. A German colleague tried the morning after to claim that the lack of impact was ironic, giving these still-troubling sentiments an inbuilt critique by deliberately lowering the dynamic level and the brilliance of tone! But such sophistries (depressingly frequent everywhere) just won’t wash.

Thus, too, the Ring: wonderful clarity and distinctness of voices vis-à-vis orchestra; moments of intimacy astounding for close palpability; the more lyric climaxes — the outswelling ardour with which Wotan relinquishes his errant daughter, or the calm after the flames as her deliverer first espies her ensorcelled in magic sleep — marvellously rich, transparent, full. But all that requires rawness, physical intensity at high volume, violent abrasion, sheer magnificent weight and power which it doesn’t deliver. Only for Parsifal is the sound absolutely right; the entire experience here is (to adapt Debussy’s well known tribute to its orchestration) ‘illuminated from within’. And this year’s new production, too, after so much had been fair-to-middling or frankly awful, succeeded for its first half at least in matching for the eyes what the music achieves when they’re closed.